HERBERT HOOVER
31st President, 1929–1933
Overall Rank: 36
Total Score: 416
Although the historians have consistently placed Hoover in the bottom ten presidents, they have also assigned him a high ranking in administrative skills (14th in 2017). This is more than offset by extremely low ranks in crisis leadership (40th) and economic management, where he ranked last (43rd) among all presidents in 2017.
Party: Republican
b. August 10, 1874, West Branch, Iowa
d. October 20, 1964, New York City, New York
First Lady: Lou Henry Hoover
Age entering office: 54
Historian: Richard Norton Smith
Biographer and presidential historian Richard Norton Smith has served as the director of five presidential libraries, including the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. He joined Q & A on August 28, 2018, to discuss his book, The Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover. Mr. Smith is one of three advisers for C-SPAN’s Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership.
[The title of my book, The Uncommon Man, is] taken from the title of a relatively famous Hoover speech about the uncommon man. Vice President Henry Wallace, who was the second of FDR’s vice presidents, gave a famous speech in 1942 about the century of the common man. Wallace, from a left-of-center perspective, was projecting the goals and ambitions of the generation that was fighting World War II. It wasn’t enough simply to defeat the Nazis, but to create at home a true democracy, a place where the common man would finally come into his own. Hoover approached this from a different place on the political spectrum. He was making the case for what we might call a meritocracy—when you get sick, you want an uncommonly skillful doctor; when we go to war, we want an uncommonly able general.… The advances in society were brought about not by common, but by uncommon individuals. It was Hoover wit. He said, “I’ve never met an American parent who is proud to have their son or daughter called common.” It’s an interesting outlook.
It seemed to me that this phrase applied to Hoover more than anyone else. Hoover said, “When all is said and done, accomplishment is all that matters.” Which, when you stop to think about it, is rather unsentimental—the sort of thing you would expect an engineer to say. And that’s one of the keys to understanding his life, his success in everything but the presidency.
Herbert Hoover’s life began in August 1874. General Grant was in the White House. His father was a blacksmith, Jesse Hoover. His mother, Huldah Hoover—first of all, they’re both Quakers, which meant that she was an equal presence in the church, in the community, in the home—she was a lay preacher, if you will. So, religion was a significant part of his early days. He remembered—again, it seems to me such a window on his later shortcomings as a politician in particular—as a boy sitting in the stark, cold, barren meetinghouse that the Quakers used in West Branch, Iowa. His feet didn’t even touch the floor. Along with all the adults, women on one side, men on the other, [he was] waiting for the divine light to illuminate his life, to move him to speak as it moved others in the congregation. He also said something terribly poignant. He said he was ten years old before he realized that he could do something for the sheer joy of it without offending the Lord.
When people wrote about the adult Hoover being an enigma, an emotionally distant man who was nevertheless clearly very moved by the suffering, particularly of children, in Belgium and thereafter—they had trouble making the two Hoovers blend. And in some ways, it’s a preview of his strengths with a mirror side of his weaknesses.
He was orphaned [young]. Jesse died first, and Huldah [died when Herbert]… may have been ten. He was put on a train with ten cents sewn into his underclothes and some homemade vittles and sent to Oregon to live with a Quaker uncle by the name of Minthorn in Newberg.… And there he was trained in business. His uncle was a businessman, and Bert, as he was known, went on to Stanford. He was in the original class. In fact, Stanford became probably the closest thing to a home away from home. He would be a trustee for over fifty years. He built his home there; today, it’s the university’s president’s house.
Bert loved Stanford. He ran a laundry business. He ran other businesses, so he had this entrepreneurial streak in him. [He] studied geology and engineering; met and fell in love with Lou Henry, also from Iowa, a unique woman in many ways, the first [woman] at Stanford to earn a geology degree. They had this real respectful partnership from the beginning. They were intellectual equals. The best evidence of that is they were married in 1899, and the government of China had invited him to help develop that country’s mines. They sailed, on their honeymoon,… to Tientsin, where they were promptly caught up in the Boxer Rebellion, which was the uprising of native forces against the Westerners, who for too long had subjugated and exploited a very weak China. They were in Tientsin during the siege, and there are these wonderful letters. Lou was the perfect wife [for Hoover] because she loved adventure, and to her the Boxer Rebellion was an adventure. She writes letters home saying, “You’re missing one of the great sieges of the age.” She also said later that she got up every morning and swept the bullets off her front porch.
They had two children, two sons. Lou designed—you can see it at the library in West Branch—a cradle exclusively for use on board ocean liners. By the time Herbert Junior was eight years old, he’d been around the world five times. Hoover, who began digging ore in Nevada, was then hired by a London mining firm at the age of twenty-three and sent to Australia. He found fabulous riches there for his employers. And then he went to London. By the time he is in his thirties, he’s generally regarded as the world’s foremost mining engineer. In fact, one of the things that would come back to haunt him throughout his political career, throughout his public life, were those among his own countrymen, nativists, who believed that he was not sufficiently American, that he was somehow really British. It’s reminiscent of some of the allegations made against Barack Obama when he ran for president.
Hoover was forty years old in 1914, living in London, hugely successful and restless.… He had a Quaker conscience, and he was bored with just making money. He was a millionaire several times over, and he was not terribly impressed with wealth. And so, in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he was very receptive when he was approached by some fellow engineers. The first crisis of the war was something approaching 120,000 American travelers who were in Europe at the time the war broke out who managed to make their way to London, but then they had to get home. Hoover agreed to lead this group—that [he even funded]… at times, which managed to organize transportation to get all of these people out of the war zone—to get them home. The thing to remember about this is, for all the checks he wrote, and he wrote a lot of checks, he said later on only $500 wasn’t repaid, which is a fraction. It taught him a lesson, for better or worse, which is the foundation on which everything that follows rests: he had an unlimited faith in the generosity, the basic goodness, and the trustworthiness of the American people. That’s important because subsequently, within a matter of weeks, he was approached about taking on an enormous task, something never before attempted, something that no one could really put their arms around because it was unprecedented.
Belgium had been invaded early in the war by the Germans. It was out of the war, but there were seven and a half million people in Belgium who faced starvation. At one point, Hoover was told they were down to about five days’ food supply. In addition, there was a corner of France [that was similarly impacted]. Between the two, there were ten million people who confronted the real specter of starving to death. In the face of that, Hoover was asked to abandon his career for however long the war lasted and undertake the organization of what I call an independent republic of relief. No one had any idea of the dimensions of the task. They learned that the hard way.
Eventually something called the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, or the CRB [evolved]. Remember, Britain was blockading Europe and Germany. The Germans didn’t want to feed the Belgians. The British were shocked that anyone asked them to feed the Belgians, who, after all, had been invaded by the Germans. What Hoover was doing, or attempting to do, had never been done before. In the end, it was a four-year effort that cost over $1 billion, when $1 billion was real money. Much of it was voluntarily raised, some of it provided by warring governments, but he kept the Belgians alive.
… Lou said later on that he was never the same after Belgium, after what he saw, particularly the children. Remember, he was an orphan, and all his life there was something about Hoover. He was not naturally gifted in social interaction, but with children he was a different person. And Belgium stamped him, for better or worse. The other remarkable thing,… [the relief effort] was all voluntary. He appealed to the American people. He said of the American people, if you tell them what you need, they will give you the shirts off their backs.
At this point, the United States wasn’t in the war. That reinforced Hoover’s belief so that all his life he was looking for a third way between laissez-faire capitalism, which he abhorred, and socialism, which he dreaded. And he came up with this term—it’s terribly clunky, very Hooveresque—“voluntary association.” The idea was that without government coercion, without legislative edict, you could reach Americans at the grassroots through churches, through community chests, through the Red Cross, through a whole host of volunteer organizations. That was the backbone of America. That was the strength of America. That was what gave voice to American ideals. That was great, and it worked.
And then, Woodrow Wilson asked Hoover to come home. He had become a phenomenon, as you might imagine. Wilson entrusted him with something called the American Food Administration. It’s all voluntary. There are no ration cards in World War I. He uses propaganda. He uses public relations, this new embryonic science, to reach people and touch people and motivate people to respond to his appeals. So, there were meatless Mondays, and there were wheatless Wednesdays. Not every campaign worked.… The idea was the American people would grow more, save more, and together they would feed their allies across the sea.
There were two problems with that. Again, it confirmed Hoover in his belief, which by now was a bedrock conviction, that whatever the problem, you didn’t need a government solution, you just needed to organize.… Economically, the legacy was that farmers grew more and more [crops]. They became addicted to surplus purchases overseas. Of course, in the 1920s, no more war, no more European markets. There’s a slump. So, there was an agricultural depression in America long before 1929, and that was one of the things that bedeviled presidents throughout the period.
Both parties in 1920 had flirted with the idea of nominating Hoover. Wilson told his brother-in-law that if it was left to him, he would choose as his successor Herbert Hoover. Hoover talked to some Democrats in 1920, but he decided he was a Bull Moose Republican; he was a Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Republican. He was not a Standpatter. In fact, his problem with the Republican Party throughout the ’20s and throughout his presidency was from the right wing of the party. They never really trusted him.…
The Harding administration [was elected in] 1920. Warren Harding, rather touchingly aware of his own limitations, set out to recruit a cabinet of the best men. Charles Evans Hughes became secretary of state. Harding gave Hoover a choice, and Hoover picked the Commerce Department, which in those days was perhaps the least important department in the cabinet. Hoover being Hoover, soon there were cartoons portraying him as secretary of commerce and under-secretary of everything else. He did ruffle a lot of feathers.… He created something [larger] out of what was already there, the Federal Radio Commission. Radio is regulated because Hoover started it, a forerunner of the FCC. From the outset, he was certain that he did not want a BBC-type arrangement. He wanted government to regulate the [broadcasting] industry, but he didn’t want government to run the industry, with enormous repercussions ever since. The first airfield in Washington was Hoover Field, where the Pentagon is now. He wrote zoning regulations that could be adapted all over the country. He promoted the construction of new housing with standardized products. Hoover was an engineer. He thought like an engineer. He ate like an engineer. In the Hoover White House, it was famous that no state dinner could last more than sixty minutes. He once ate five courses in thirteen minutes.
He was commerce secretary for… seven and a half years under Harding and Coolidge.
Hoover accompanied Harding on his cross-country voyage of understanding to Alaska, where Harding fell ill. And then they returned to San Francisco.… Harding was clearly impressed by something, and he couldn’t get it off his chest. He couldn’t sleep, and he played bridge endlessly, game after game of bridge. It’s funny, Hoover, who loved cards, permanently lost his taste for bridge… because that trip had worn his tolerance for the game but also because of the tragic consequences of the trip. Harding asked him at one point, cryptically, “If you knew of some great scandal within the administration, what would you do?” Hoover’s advice was to go public with it all, totally. He said, “You would at least get credit for exposing the wrongdoers.” Harding didn’t bring up the subject again, but it was very clear to Hoover that Teapot Dome and the other Harding scandals had broken through. Later on, he said, “People don’t die of broken hearts. But people can get exhausted and be vulnerable to heart attacks because of profound disappointment.” And clearly Warren Harding was disappointed.
The completion of that story: Harding died in August 1923. Coolidge becomes president, and he retains Hoover. They don’t have the same chemistry that Harding did. Coolidge was as suspicious of activity as Hoover was unwilling to be inactive. Plus, I think Coolidge sensed Hoover’s ambition. And yet [it was Hoover he turned to] when the Mississippi River overflowed—to this day, by some measurements, the greatest natural disaster in American history, 1927. The flood covered thousands and thousands of square miles in the South. There was no government agency; there was no expectation that government would respond in any way. There was only Herbert Hoover, who had this nickname, the “Master of Emergencies.”
In 1928, Hoover ran [for president] against a very impressive governor of New York, Al Smith, a charismatic figure, in many ways seen as the father of modern liberalism before Franklin Roosevelt. No one writes about 1928 without emphasizing the anti-Catholic bigotry that Smith ran into, particularly in the South. It’s not Barry Goldwater who broke the solid South, and it’s not Dwight Eisenhower. It was Herbert Hoover who carried Texas and several other southern states. The assumption is that he only carried them as a measure of the anti-Catholic bias that existed in the Deep South, and that clearly was a factor. But there’s another factor that tends to get overlooked, and that is the gratitude that people in the Deep South felt because Hoover was the face of relief at the time of the floods. He was the only person associated with government who had tried to address their needs.
He won big. He won by six and a half million—21.5 million votes to 15 million votes. However, beneath those numbers, there were portents for the future.… You had the makings of an early realignment. Had there not been the Great Depression, had Hoover’s reputation not been destroyed during his single term of office, what is fascinating to speculate is, would that breakthrough in the South… have been a one-time event, attributable to Al Smith as an opponent? Or, might it have foreshadowed a two-party system?
I can’t tell you [how the Great Depression came about]. I think there are a lot of economists who would, if they were honest, respond the same way. There are clearly a number of factors, some of which are easily identified: [with] the dislocations of the war; we had this crazy, crazy quilt [of issues]. As part of the Versailles agreement, crushing reparations were demanded by the victors of a defeated Germany, which was really in no position economically [to pay]—although it had been largely unscathed by the war. So, you had this crazy system where Germany is borrowing money from the United States. The United States came out of World War I as the new financial centerpiece of the world. New York supplanted London. The United States came out of World War I, for the first time in its history, as a creditor nation; the rest of the world owed it. But you had this system where American banks were loaning money to Germany, which then used the money to pay off the reparations.
In addition, domestically, you had a rotten banking system, totally unregulated. There were banks that were speculating on the stock market. There were banks that were doing things with depositors’ money that would shock us today. You had Wall Street speculation, rank, overheated, baseless. Lots of people were buying stock on margin, which is to say, they were borrowing funds. And if the stock market ever went down, particularly if it went down sharply, then they would have to sell their stock to pay off what they’d bought. The whole system was jerry-built. Hoover believed that it was the cumulative impact of the war; the dislocations brought about by the war. And it’s true that it was an international phenomenon; it was not limited to the United States. But I, for the life of me, can’t give you a single reason [for the Great Depression]. One very important contributing factor was that glut of consumer goods in the 1920s. Ironically, it was Hoover who celebrated the abundance of modern industry. Cars were affordable, so were refrigerators, so were other appliances. [There were] all of those homes that he built, but lots of them were bought on credit. Radio. Aviation. You had these new industries that were taking off, but the market became literally glutted. One thing economists know is that wages failed to keep pace with prices, so you had this gap which grew. At the same time, you had millions of people who were overcommitted. They were living paycheck to paycheck. They were speculating in stocks. And, 40 percent of the American workforce in the 1920s was in agriculture. So… nearly half the country was depressed long before Wall Street collapsed.
When Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, the federal budget was less than $4 billion, and a substantial part of that was going to veterans.… Criticism of Hoover for not being sufficiently aggressive in exerting the potential of government to affect the economy overlooks how limited was the effect. In retrospect, we see all kinds of things that we didn’t see at the time, [such as] Keynesian economics, the idea that government in bust times should bust the budget—in other words, that it should do everything it can to boost purchasing power. Depressions are all about deflation, so if you could inflate the economy, presumably, that’s the necessary medicine. But nobody knew about Keynesian economics in the 1920s.…
This is not to excuse Hoover.… Hoover exists in the shadow of FDR who did so much more [to ameliorate the impact of the Depression]. But in the context of the time, what Hoover did was seen as so much more than his predecessors. We’d had great depressions before: Martin Van Buren and President James Monroe when they were president; Grover Cleveland in the 1890s. The notion that the federal government would step in and try to correct the economic cycle was heresy. Depressions were acts of God. There were booms, and there were busts, and there was nothing you could do about it.… But the other thing was, we tend to think that the stock market collapsed in October 1929 and the next day there were bread lines. In fact, this was a story that took time to evolve. Early in 1930, the New York Times, among other media outlets, praised Hoover for doing more than any president before under the circumstances.
. . . Hoover immediately [turned to] voluntary association. Hoover called to the White House for job [creation], dozens of the nation’s leading business executives. He got them to agree to undertake an increase in their commitments. And on wages—he went and talked to Henry Ford, who initially agreed to increase workers’ wages. He contacted all the governors of the forty-eight states and appealed to them to accelerate public works programs. He himself went to Congress and asked for $150 million, which was more than any president before him—in fact, it was more than most presidents combined, and that was just the first installment. So, the idea that he did nothing is pretty thoroughly disabused.
So why is Hoover, seventy to eighty years later, pilloried? Why is he indelibly, personally, associated with the Great Depression?
There are a number of reasons for that. One, the Democrats brilliantly hired a man named Charlie Michelson who,… you might say, invented negative politics in the way that you and I would understand it. Charlie Michelson’s sole job every day, day in and day out, was to blacken the reputation of the president, to drive home in voters’ minds the fact that this man was heartless; this man was responsible for the Great Depression, et cetera. Hoover unwittingly contributed to that. Hoover’s great failure, you could say, was a failure of imagination. He should never have signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930, which, at the worst possible time, built walls around the American economy and encouraged other countries to do the same. That was a real error of judgment.
But Hoover’s great failing was temperamental. He tried to make a virtue out of this. He would say, “You can’t make a Teddy Roosevelt out of me.” Go back to that ten-year-old boy who didn’t know that he could do something for pleasure without offending God. I always thought there was a direct connection between that child and the adult Hoover, who was in many ways emotionally stunted. He was the most improbable politician. His story is unique; I suppose every president is unique in his way. One of the lessons that Hoover’s story teaches us is, beware of successful businessmen. The qualities that drive business success, the ability to work with a board of directors, the knowledge that your order will be carried out—that’s not the same as working with Congress. Hoover had poor relations with Congress, which was nominally Republican the first half of his term and then marginally Democratic the second half. He didn’t have the political gift. He knew he didn’t have the political gift. But that’s the other lesson of the Hoover presidency. Hoover is one of those very rare presidents; William Howard Taft comes to mind, quasi James Madison comes to mind—people who are almost too rational, too cerebral, who don’t have in their DNA whatever that political gene is that enables a Lyndon Johnson, in the most extreme example, to thrive.
He ran again in 1932. He was nominated by a listless Republican convention. One thing we haven’t mentioned is Prohibition—another issue that complicated life, particularly for the Republicans because they had a lot of rural supporters. The Republican Party was split on the issue of Prohibition. Hoover was a cosmopolitan figure who didn’t mind taking a drink, but who was sworn to enforce the law. And in 1932, he was on the unpopular side of the issue. By 1932, there were a lot of people, including original supporters of Prohibition, that concluded that this experiment had not worked, and that in many ways it has backfired. So, he was carrying that dead weight. He had the Depression. He had his own inability to inspire.…
The [veterans’] Bonus Army came to town [demanding payment of their World War I bonuses], and measures are still being debated [in Congress], still the subject of controversy. He dispatched Douglas MacArthur, of all people, [telling him] not to cross the bridge over into Anacostia and set fire to the veterans’ camp, as MacArthur took it upon himself to do. Hoover sent explicit orders to MacArthur, and they were disobeyed. It was not the last time that Douglas MacArthur was to disobey executive authority.
FDR swept the country. Hoover had fifty-nine electoral votes.… I don’t think anyone has ever gone from such an overwhelming mandate when he was elected to so powerful a consensus that he should leave office. Roosevelt carried all but six states, and with it, Congress.
And then, what put the seal on Hoover’s reputation as a failed president was the next three months. The Hoover-Roosevelt interregnum was so bad that the Constitution was amended. Presidents used to be sworn in on March 4. It was decided that that was too long because it was too long in 1932–1933. The two men had virtually no communication. Hoover believed that FDR was deliberately avoiding having any responsibility in the hopes that if things did go to hell, that he would then receive the credit. And in many ways, that’s exactly what happened.
The banks were crashing at the end; the roof was falling in. Hoover could have closed the banks, but there was that—some would say stubbornness, some would say principle—I would say lack of political finesse. He insisted that FDR had to agree with him, that it had to be a joint undertaking. And there’s a difference: FDR is not only a born politician, but a natural pragmatist. It’s FDR who says, “Try something. If it doesn’t work, try something else, but above all, try something.” That is exactly what the American people wanted to hear after four years in which it was felt that nothing had been tried. In fact, a lot had been tried, but it came very soon to be overshadowed by the scale and the scope of what FDR undertook.
[As for his legacy] you could look physically at Hoover Dam. It was no accident that his name was put on it because he, as secretary of commerce, negotiated a compact with seven Rocky Mountain states over the waters of the Colorado River that they were all fighting over.… That’s the most obvious physical legacy. Much more important is the example of a businessman who walked away from his fortune—he said, literally, “Let the fortune go to hell”—first, to feed Belgium, and then to organize American relief, and ultimately to go on to save more lives than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao together could eliminate. Not a bad epitaph.